Is Pinterest a Valid Social Media Strategy to Use?

Well we have every other “major” business social profile setup that we can think of. But we are trying to build links into our site that are natural and come from authoritative sites. One way to do this is to use social media profiles that allow a link back to our web pages. Pinterest does that. So we decided to see if we can use this to our advantage.

#1 Setting up our Pinterest Site

The first thing we did was go to the business side of the Pinterest website and signed up for an account. From there you just add some information about your business, none that goes into to much depth, only a few things to sign up for like email, password, personal name, business name, description, pick a URL, and that’s it.

Then you will need to follow some interests that you have in order to move on to the main site. Don’t worry about this, just pick some things that you like. Then its off to the board. One there it is easy to add a new board and pin a few items from either the web or upload them from your own computer.

One thing that I would recommend you do is go into the edit profile button on the top and make sure you confirm your information is correct, add a logo to your board, a good description, and at the bottom make sure you verify your website. This was the most important thing for us because this is why we setup Pinterest in the first place.

If you use WordPress the easiest way to do this is with a plugin called SEO by Yoast, and all you do is simple copy the code they have for the “meta option” and paste that into the first page of the SEO dashboard under the Pinterest section. Make sure you only grab the Pinterest code and not all of the HTML code. After a while (a few minutes) it will verify your site. All done and SUPER EASY!

# 2 Making some Boards just to get Started

Here I would try and make some boards of your favorite things related to your website. It doesn’t matter what it is, your favorite articles, websites, cool stuff, pictures of animals, favorite sayings. Whatever you want, just make it interesting and useful. Also you want to make sure it is shareable.

Just a note is that before you pin a bunch of random photos you want to make sure that they are from good reputable sources and not some weird site. Second make sure you are using the pin button and they are not prohibited from being used on Pinterest or have copyright issues.

Then follow other boards with people who have similar interests. After all this is a social media site and you will want to follow and then follow, and then follow some more. This is one time you want to be a follower until you have enough followers to become a leader.

# 3 Start Using Rich Pins, for this is the Reason for a Pinterest Business Account

Most business and web site builders will fall into these five categories so making sure you get this part setup is crucial. This is not automatically done you have to apply to get this done. For most WordPress users if you have the SEO plugin by Yoast you will be able to do this easily for things as articles. But for products, and other items you may need additional plugins that cost money. There are plenty of great articles out there to help you get setup, see article in the credits section number 2 and 3 below.

For us we simple made sure the box “add Open Graph meta data” was checked in the Yoast SEO plugin, by going to the WordPress dashboard, selecting SEO, then Social and verifying the box is checked. Then we went to the Pin URL validator on Pinterest and validated each pin. You need to make sure you have all the SEO information filled out in your Post to make this work.

We then went to the Rich Pin article URL validator on Pinterest and validated our URL which it worked perfectly and said our pins been validated, then we simply hit the apply now button. We did that for three articles and then we wait for Pinterest to approve it. I have heard that once you get some approved that articles should automatically start showing up. But we will see about that one.

PRODUCT RICH PINS seem to be a lot harder to setup. Now if you are a retail giant like Nordstrom or Target it is fairly easy because of the infrastructure they have. But for people like me it is a little more difficult. Also there is not a clear cut answer about how to do it. I do know that there are some great plugins to help with this, for WoCommerce and OpenCart there are some that are not to expensive.

Do you know of any other great ways to get product Rich Pins working on WordPress?

# 4 Use Unique Content to get Traffic to your Site

This is probably the last thing we will go over. Well in fact is is the last thing. You see this is what you should be concentrating most of your efforts on. Most of the pinning is re-pinning about 80% of it. That leaves a small amount of it that is unique or new. That is where you want to spend most of your time.

GET A UNIQUE PHOTO WITH A COOL TIP: nothing is better than to make a photo of something useful along with a good description of it and then pin it with a link back to the article within your site. For instance a great photo of your waist line with some tips you are using to get slimmer quickly. Then that will link back to an article on your site that people can re-tweet, post on Facebook, and re-pin. Make the photo and text match and one or the other remarkable so people will click on it. The more helpful the better.

MAKE A UNIQUE PIN: here is where you can shine. Take the time to make a unique pin, get a really cool photograph, add special effects to your photo, make an info-graphic

LIST YOUR ARTICLES: you probably have a lot of content you need to make sure you have an adequate library for. Pinterest is a great way to have all those articles available and ready for others to pin and for you to view.

SECRET BOARDS: use it internally for marketing use – build a secret board to track marketing trends, competitor items, and stuff you want to know about but dont want others to see. Do market research on your customers, look at products you may want to build in the future, and stockpile ideas.

# 5 Well one last things is to add a WIDGET to your site.

This is an easy thing to do and a great way to show off your Pinterest content on your website. Pinterest allows you to make custom widgets of your boards and post them on your site. Simple click on the right most menu item, three dots if you are in a board itself, or the gear if you are on the main page. Then click add a widget and paste the code into your site. You can change the pin image size and the width and height of the board if you like. See an example of our board below.